I don’t understand Net Neutrality. Everything I DuckDuckGo is horribly biased. WTH is it?

It literally won’t affect anything. There is no reason to care about an absurd bandwagon with zero relevance to the Average Joe (or Jeff in your case).

Senator Davis wrote:

It literally won’t affect anything. There is no reason to care about an absurd bandwagon with zero relevance to the Average Joe (or Jeff in your case).

Why repeal Net Neutrality(which we currently have)? If it won't affect anything why bother? What could the reason be$$$$$$$$$$$

Think of the internet as the highway outside your house.

You can get on it and go anywhere at 60mph.

Anybody can get on it and come to you at 60mph.

If net neutrality is ended, speed limits will be enforced based on money.

You may only be allowed to drive 20mph, and would have to pay extra to go 60mph.

Somebody coming to you may be able to go only 20mph, while others are allowed 60mph.

Example: FedEx pays for special access and can drive 60mph and make deliveries in two days.

Speedy doesn't pay for special access and have to drive 20mph and take 5 days to deliver.

The highway system is supported by all taxpayers, so all taxpayers should have equal access.

Government should not allow someone to put stop signs up to slow down some but not others.

12345678901234567890

A service provider might accept a payment from google, and let their traffic zoom at 60mph.

While duckduckgo can't afford the payment, so anybody using them can only go 20mph.

Replace the Mile Per Hour with Megabytes Per Second.

Some pages will load and respond fast,

some will be slow.

Google will prosper because of the performance difference they have bought,

and duckduckgo will die.

Despite the internet being a utility created by tax dollars.

Another example:

Netflix pays for special performance and their videos load seemlessly fast.

Another video site doesn't pay, and their videos pause every 5 seconds to load more data.

Netflix prospers, the other video site dies.

The internet service providers can pick winners and losers.

An ISP that is conservative biased (since they are huge corporations, they all are) can speed

up Breitbart, Limbaugh, Beck, and the other whackaloons, while slowing down MSNBC, CNN, Rueters, etc.

Or Google but not Bing.

Or Walmart but not Target.

Or McDonalds but not Hardies

Or Roadrunnersports but not Dickssportinggoods

Or Yahoo but not MSN

Or Nike but not Asics

Or letsjog but not letsrun

The government (taxpayers) funded much of the development of the web, all taxpayers (not only you, but businesses) should have equal access - that is equal speed.

If net neutrality goes away the ISP will make winners (those who pay for special access and get the high speeds) and losers (those who don't and have their speeds throttled back) despite the internet being a utility that everybody contributed to with their tax dollars.

Trump's FCC (or rather - their corporate backers) wants to pretend that the internet is not a utility so corporations can gouge more profit and influence who succeeds and who fails.

Short answer is that it really depends on what the cable companies do with the decreased regulation.

If you are wanting to start a new business, you might be at a disadvantage now that fast lanes are going to be a thing (though if you are an established business, you can probably afford the better access leading to a more convenient product).

If you want to use a business that is disadvantaged, you could be inconvenienced or even denied service (examples of cases that were attempted in the past include Netflix or FaceTime, though both of those are likely going to be mostly fine because now they have enough resources to pay the cable company's premiums, unless the companies themselves decide to attempt to get into the market with their own service).

Lots of things CAN happen, but it's another story as to what WILL happen. Again, the short answer being that it will depend on what the cable companies do (what they feel they can get away with without losing too much business as a result).

Thank you for this. Very helpful.

I will keep checking in to see if anyone disagrees. Most of what I have found seems to echo your sentiment. Would love to hear a counter argument, if there is one.

Remember, Google builds its own data centers around the world, connected by its own private backbone (Net Neutrality doesn't apply), with direct connections straight to the ISPs and content delivery networks that serve static content from closer to people's homes. By your highway analogy, Google is the guy that:

* Has its own highways

* Lives closer to the highway onramps

* Has people in every city so they only need neighborhood roads to visit you

and now you're worried Google might load faster?

Good luck accessing your conservative news sources once the Liberal Media RULES the new net.

theJeff wrote:

Thank you for this. Very helpful.

I will keep checking in to see if anyone disagrees. Most of what I have found seems to echo your sentiment. Would love to hear a counter argument, if there is one.

One very basic way to evaluate a response is to see if that response includes pros and cons for both sides of the argument. The guy you are thanking did not give you a fair and balanced viewpoint. You should be careful listening to what he says. On the internet and in media, the loudest and most widespread voices tend to be (in my experience) Democrats and/or liberals. Do not confuse this volume with being the truth. Look hard for other opinions.

The answers so far are pretty good. There is a lot that goes into this so I'm going to cover a lot of ground here as quickly as I can.

---- What is an Internet Service Provider (ISP)? ----

A company like Comcast that delivers broadband internet to your house. It controls the wire between you and the internet. You send a request to some website through the ISP, and the website is delivered back to your house through the ISP. Note some of them also happen to be owned by big media companies with their own websites and web services.

---- What is Net Neutrality?----

Under current net neutrality rules, ISPs cannot charge different amounts for accessing different websites or different kinds of data. They can only charge by amount of data and bandwidth. They also cannot block any websites, they must let you access any data you ask for.

---- What will happen if we end NN?----

Nobody knows for sure what ISPs will do, but there are many things they will be allowed to do that they currently are not. So a lot of things might happen.

----What might happen if we end NN?----

(1) ISPs might start charging extra to visit certain sites or use certain kinds of data. Remember how some ISPs also own media companies? So maybe that ISP includes their own video service "for free" as part of a basic package, but charges an extra premium for Netflix. You don't pay, Netflix is blocked. They might sign a deal with CNN to provide news "for free" and all other news channels cost extra. Same for video games, Skype or VoIP, social media, banking websites, email providers, bookstores, anything is possible.

(2) They might mess with traffic from other sites. They can cause Netflix video to stutter or throttle or buffer while their own video service is silky smooth, so you cancel Netflix. They can insert their own ads onto websites you access, or even censor parts of the websites you don't like. (Use HTTPS or a VPN service whenever possible to prevent this, however, ISPs might decide to block or charge extra for HTTPS or especially for VPNs.)

(3) They might completely block (censor) websites they don't like. For example, maybe they decide Wikileaks is too subversive and block it. Maybe someone puts up an anti-Comcast website, so they block it. Maybe letsrun gets flagged for foul language and they block it.

----What is the history of NN?----

In the USA, traditionally ISPs mostly adhered to NN principles. However, there have been many incidents where they blocked or throttled certain kinds of traffic, which caused public outcry and sometimes legal decisions. There was a court case with Verizon in 2014 that more or less said that, to enforce NN, the FCC had to classify ISPs as common carriers. In 2015, they did so and the NN principles that we have had since the beginning of the Internet were finally encoded into law. Note that some are currently trying to make it sound like 2015 was a huge reversal of policy from the history of internet regulation, but this is misleading -- we have always had net neutrality by and large as companies were afraid to violate it and got put in their place each time they did.

----What are the arguments for keeping NN as it is?----

NN is really important for the internet both economically and in terms of free access to information.

(1) Economically, NN keeps competition on the Internet free and open. If a user pays for 10Mbps, every website gets delivered with equal treatment at 10Mbps. This means a new video streaming startup can compete with Netflix and Comcast on a totally equal footing. Without NN, Comcast can simply block people from accessing the small startup and can charge huge extra amounts to Netflix, giving a huge uncompetitive advantage to their own streaming service. This is compounded by the problem that many people have no alternatives for ISPs (it's Comcast or dialup).

(2) In terms of free access, abolishing NN is the first step toward censoring the web. It will be very easy for the government to put pressure on ISPs to start blocking sites they don't like, and ISPs might choose to do so anyway.

----What are the arguments for removing NN (and what is wrong with them)?----

Most of the arguments I've seen say: NN is a regulation, and regulations are bad, therefore NN is bad. The usual anti-regulation points are then invoked: regulations hurt investment and innovation, stifle companies, are costly to comply with, etc.

However, these arguments apply poorly to ISPs and NN. All data costs the same to deliver to users. So ISPs aren't providing any new or extra services by removing NN, they just are getting to charge more for the same services by using price discrimination. Abolishing NN won't encourage them to invest more (history has shown this), it will just allow them to exploit and extract more money just by sitting in between users and the services those users want. Also, NN is not onerous to comply with; ISPs have been doing it forever including the last two years with no problems.

----What is a good analogy for NN?----

Imagine only one company ships packages to your house, say FedEx. NN is like requiring that FedEx only charges by weight and distance, not by who is shipping the package or what's inside. Anyone who wants to send you a package, must be allowed to.

Abolishing NN is like allowing FedEx (your only shipping company) to charge a different amount to ship 50lbs from Brand X Furniture in Dallas to your home in Illinois than 50lbs from Brand Y Furniture in Dallas to the same home. In fact, it's also like FedEx happens to own Brand X Furniture and decides to make shipping free for Brand X but really expensive for brand Y. If there's a new startup, Brand Z, even if it's located nearby in Indiana, FedEx can still refuse to ship it to you and you cannot buy any Brand Z. Also, if your friend in Dallas sends you a package, FedEx is allowed to open it, and if they see it contains furniture, they might decide to route it to your house via the slow truck to Alaska.

stateroftheoblivious wrote:

...

This is a good explanation.

Please don't make this a partisan issue. Net neutrality, like free speech, is an ideal that should not be partisan. You might say, it's silly to compare a seemingly technocratic issue like net neutrality to something so fundamental such as free speech. However, as more and more of our conversation is happening online, I would say that the principle of free speech should include net neutrality.

By the way, you can obviously tell from my post that I am strongly in favor of Net Neutrality, however I did my best to stick to the facts and fairly describe the main arguments for both sides. I may come across as biased in two cases:

(1) When discussing the history of NN, but it is important to set the record straight as a lot of misinformation about NN history is coming from the FCC and even people in Congress. For example, they refer to NN as an "Obama-era regulation" and describe the repeal of NN as a "return to the light-touch regulatory approach that caused the growth of the Internet", and these are clearly misleading rewritings of history.

(2) I briefly categorize the "eliminate NN" arguments as being mainly in the vein of generic anti-regulation arguments, however, I have read a lot of material from Ajit Pai and Congresspeople supporting him, and I believe this to be an accurate, unbiased (if blunt) summary of their arguments.

Unfortunately, I think many so-called conservative Congresspeople have been hoodwinked by the above arguments into thinking that abolishing NN will somehow be good for competition, the free market, and innovation, when nothing could be further from the truth -- it will only help near-monopolies exploit their advantage to squash competition and startups/innovation.

theJeff wrote:

Thank you for this. Very helpful.

I will keep checking in to see if anyone disagrees. Most of what I have found seems to echo your sentiment. Would love to hear a counter argument, if there is one.

As far as I can tell, the counter-argument is that some websites (Netflix) cost the ISPs more resources than others (letsrun), so the ISPs argue that they ought to be able to charge Netflix more for upkeep and/or control the rate at which Netflix is streamed. This passes some of the ISP costs from consumers to websites, which may again pass those costs back to the users of those websites by raising fees (effectively charging heavy web users more than lighter ones).

Of course, it's still dumb for the reasons mentioned above, namely that: 1. nobody wants the ISP to be able to control the flow of information; 2. most people are happy with the current system; 3. any costs that are passed from the consumers to the websites are going to get passed back to the consumers who use those ISPs (the cost of Netflix would go up); 4. charging users by the GB for their personal internet usage would be a better solution to the stated "problem".

In terms of a normal utility, it might be like if your electric company were able to charge the makers of your electrical appliances additional fees or control how many of a given appliance is sold, in addition to charging you for electricity by the kW-hr.

This is not a partisan issue. Its a corporate control of our nation vs democratic. If this goes through more cities need to model after Chattanooga, Tenn and provide the net as a public utility at a much lower price. Thats the model in European Union.

When 2 nations in Europe broke from the EU, Portugal and Spain, prices dramatically rose and service complaints quadrupled.

The competition aspect that the corporations (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast) cite is a political facade in which they are able to monopolize the marketplace and eliminate small providers and gouge customers for higher profits.

Comcast already has plans ready to roll out that will charge content streaming providers not affiliated with Comcast much higher rates aka Flotrack - essentially doubling the already high cost of a niche streaming service. Porn will be like cable with special high cost access to stream. Gamers will especially pay a higher rate to continue playing on-line. The line from the corporations that this way those using more pay more really means they will rip most everyone off more.

It will not be liberals taking control, rather its conservatives who own all these major corporations that will block sites by causing speeds so slow they never load if it offers any criticism of the ISP's.

We should fight hard to defeat this as once its gone there will be almost no way reigning it back in. The ultimate push back if it is approved is for the 80% of Americans opposed to this to simply cancel internet service. Use wifi in public places or corporations as needed but cancelling home service would tell all these greedy bastards to stick up their ass.

Very good responses by "know my stuff." I'm not an expert myself, but I've done a lot of research on the topic (going to places arguing both for and against NN to gather their respective arguments) and I think he hits the nail on the head here.

I'm consistently conservative/libertarian on most things, but 1) I agree with those that say this should be a bipartisan issue and 2) The conservatives I see arguing against NN are basically saying what "know my stuff" describes. I went to my usual source for conservative news (no not Brietbart) which is usually very good at giving me both sides of the argument and I wanted to see how they would try to convince me NN was bad. They failed epically.

They are against big government and want a free market (and I do too), but it doesn't work with the internet for the reasons "know my stuff" explains as well as the fact that for so many people there is no free market for ISPs. The conservative guy I listen to argued, "Well Comcast isn't going to start throttling Netflix because then their customers would leave and go to Verizon." Well no, because most places only have one real option. Currently I don't have access to Comcast or Verizon. MY ONLY OPTION is Spectrum. If Spectrum screws me over, I have no alternative other than not having internet.

Those against NN also seem to argue that ending NN will give the chance for more ISPs to get in the game, but they don't really explain to me why that would be the case at all. Even if it was true, it'd take yearss for that to happen and I don't want to deal with the potential sh!t storm in the meantime. ... Keyword there is potential. Maybe the ISPs don't screw us over if NN ends, but I rather not take the chance. The internet works pretty freaking great right now, I don't see why we should fix what isn't broken.

TLDR - If you want to ignore my rambling above, here is the point that speaks loudest for me. ISPs are against NN and places like Google/Facebook/Netflix are for NN. It's not hard to connect the dots from there and see which is best for the consumer. Just read Netflix's evolving position on NN. Two years ago they fought hard against ISPs for NN because without NN they might not have made it. Now, being the mega company they are, they are still for NN on principle, but they aren't as worried about it anymore because it'll hurt the little guys more than them.

know my stuff wrote:

For example, they refer to NN as an "Obama-era regulation" and describe the repeal of NN as a "return to the light-touch regulatory approach that caused the growth of the Internet", and these are clearly misleading rewritings of history.

Conservatives are always rewriting history.

"Obama-era regulation" is a dog whistle that feeds into the subconscious of the right wing.

The word "Obama" equates to evil in their mind.

The "Obama phone" us another example.

The Lifeline program providing low cost telephone service to poor people was signed into law in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan.

It was expanded in 1996 under President Bill Clinton

It was updated to include cell phones in 2008 under President Bush.

Note that Obama had nothing to do with it.

But by including the word "Obama" the conservatives could tickle the lizard brain of their supporters to get them to rally against it without knowing what it was or what it did.

Same thing with Net Neutrality.

Rfg wrote:

theJeff wrote:

Thank you for this. Very helpful.

I will keep checking in to see if anyone disagrees. Most of what I have found seems to echo your sentiment. Would love to hear a counter argument, if there is one.

One very basic way to evaluate a response is to see if that response includes pros and cons for both sides of the argument. The guy you are thanking did not give you a fair and balanced viewpoint. You should be careful listening to what he says. On the internet and in media, the loudest and most widespread voices tend to be (in my experience) Democrats and/or liberals. Do not confuse this volume with being the truth. Look hard for other opinions.

Thanks for the well-meaning advice.

I am still listening out for a good counter-argument. It sounds like the only good one is that Netflix et al costs the ISPs more, so it may be fair to pass that cost along to the consumer.

Still, from the Selfish Consumer standpoint, opposing the end of NN seems pretty common-sense.

stateroftheoblivious wrote:

Think of the internet as the highway outside your house.

You can get on it and go anywhere at 60mph.

Anybody can get on it and come to you at 60mph.

If net neutrality is ended, speed limits will be enforced based on money.

.

This analogy is a popular one, but I don't think it's entirely accurate. Roads are paid for by taxpayer dollars. They belong to everyone equally because we've all footed the bill for them in one way or another.

Internet service is a product provided by private businesses. Imagine starting a business, taking massive risks with the hope of an eventual payoff, succeeding, and then being told that you can't charge what you want for your product. That is not capitalism. If another company wants to provide the same speed of service to all customers, regardless of how much they are willing to pay, then the only thing stopping them is a business license.

Regulations always raise fees and prices!

Obama regulated Healthcare, deductibles went up bc healthy people were paying for sick people.

Obama regulated food, food prices went up.

They don't come down.

IF this place is a liberal echo chamber so be it.

But know ahead of time, you will be scammed by Govt.

Govt is not love

Govt is force